Biljana Jancic makes site-specific interventions into the volumetric forms of given architectural spaces and situations. These may take the form of sculptural installations, markings across floor and walls or light, projected, cast and shaped as well as alluded to through other materials such as reflective tapes and vinyls. She uses readily available materials, often nudging them away from yet retaining some reference to their light industrial or everyday purposes. Conduit and plumbing piping features heavily, for example, as do forms of industrial tape. Jancic’s interventions not only concentrate visual, spatial and psychological experiences of space, they draw attention to what we might think of as an expectation of that space: the wider societal and historical context in which it sits; the uses it is more generally put to; how both individuals and groups of people tend to inhabit or move through it; or the way in which the white cube gallery is treated as somehow neutral, a space of abstraction or pure form of a kind articulated within Suprematism. In Jancic’s work exhibition spaces are treated as somehow always at once sculptural volumes, architectural forms and modalities akin to bodies – sensory, simultaneously contained yet always in flux, always forming, deposing and forming themselves again in relation to others.
For Primavera 2016 Jancic is bringing together two formal elements or approaches seen in previous discrete projects, creating both a tension between two different forms of visual field, but also a space that amplifies the visual presence of visitors in the gallery, casting them in shadow and reflection across the floor and walls. One element is a shaft of mirrored tape running across the floor and out through the door of the gallery, both piercing the skin of the gallery as an architectural container and linking the exhibition with a world beyond. As in the example of her work Opposed (2013) at the Lock-Up in Newcastle, this surface acts akin to light cleaving space, a fundamentally ephemeral yet structural gesture that also encourages a thinking not simply of but beyond the architectural and exhibition setting – the work figuratively projects the imagination elsewhere.
Something similar occurs through the second element also, a projection of a distorted, unkeyed rectangle of blue light into a wedge or corner in the space. This is the default blue of a blank screen, a placeholder for content (and so an indication of time passing, of the act of waiting for something to appear). It is an inbetween space, or a holding space that Jancic has explored previously through using blue tape to mark out the field of the unkeyed projection (Channel, 2015), just as she has used this Chroma Key blue to colour plastic piping constructions that stand in as a spatial outline for absent walls (Untitled, 2015). This blue also brings to mind the work of Yves Klein and a sense of the void, not just a space of waiting or an inbetween state, but a space of profound emptiness, the beautiful emptiness that draws perception, the psychological and the imaginative self far beyond the confines of the gallery.
In the wake of ‘60s minimal sculpture and site-specific installation of the ‘70s onwards it became something of a convention to talk of or write about artwork as being ‘about’ space, to cite artwork as being an articulation of the space it inhabits, or involved in transforming our perception and experience of a given space. The 21st century modulation of this is the social dimension introduced to such practice through ‘80s and ‘90s installation art, a concern with spaces as lived, as marked by their conventions of use but also by less acknowledged actions, events and behaviours, including forms of oppressive socialisation or even acts of violence. Jancic adroitly steps into this complex historical layering of sculptural trajectories, producing work that in its immediate experience does not simply live up to but steps through these frames of art and history, steps beyond the rhetoric of physical site specificity to that of perceptual projection and imagination.
Blair French
Catalogue essay from ‘Primavera 2016 – Young Australian Artists’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia.